Malnutrition: Expert urges priority to prevention

By Samuel Luka, Bauchi

In order to curb the menace of malnutrition among the children aged 6-23 months, a call has been made for governments at all levels to place priority attention to prevention more than treatment.

Speaking in Kalorgu Primary Health Care Center in Kaltungo Local Government Area of Gombe state, Philomena Erene, Nutrition Specialist, UNICEF Bauchi Field Office noted that the Fund’s main focus in Nutrition now is how to prevent malnutrition rather than waiting for the children to be severely malnurished before treatment.

“So, our main focus now is to integrate nutrition into the ongoing other sectoral programs like WASH, Agriculture, Social Protection, education programs and to also scale up our nutrition program in all LGAs and the states in Nigeria”, she said.

Erene said: “we are in Kalorgu Primary Health Center today to show you a team of (journalists) from Bauchi field office a demonstration of what UNICEF has been doing with caregivers, women with children 6-23 months”.

She said while the UNICEF promotes exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months of children’s life, it also encourage mothers to continue breastfeeding from 6 months to two years and also add complementary food.

“In Kalorgu PHC here you will see the different kinds of complementary foods that we have been promoting that is made up of available, locally affordable food that is home-grown by the mothers, making nutritious food that is nutrients densed. You can also see some of the children that are taking these foods in Kalorgu Community”, she said.

The Nutritionist said that UNICEF has a nutrition facilitator in Kaltungo Local Government Area who has been doing the food and recipe demonstration with the women.

According to her, women drawn across wards of the local government has been trained in how to produce different kinds of recipes to enable them do it in their homes.

“While we promote this complementary foods for children 6-23 months, we do not forget other children in the family and also the fathers. We encourage the fathers to eat from this food because our nutrition focus is the family because a healthy household also means healthy society”, she further explained.

Speaking on the different recipes been produced, Ladi Abdullahi, Kaltungo Local Government facilitator said that the initiative started with sensitizing the women about Orange, fresh sweet potato which contains vitamin A, in most of their foods.

She said the women are now made to understand that by eating sweet potato they can have rich food in their homes, not by consuming it alone but by making flour out of it which they can introduce into different recipes.

“We started planting on the floor but now in some cases there are some of them that doesn’t have water in their areas, so we decided to start planting in bags and sacks, that way, the bag can contain the water for some period of time, it won’t go dry on time”, Ladi said.

She said, with the initiative, the women have been able to get enough potatoes which they consume fresh one and are able to even make the powder out of it.

According to her, the program focused on enriching the available food items within the communities with vitamin A.

She said the women have been trained in making composite flour by combining different kinds of flour to make tuwo very balanced in diet to substitute meat which many households finds difficult to afford.

“Apart from Orange, fresh sweet potato, we plant other vegetables, mostly spinach and others. Instead of using ordinary flour we are incorporating orange fresh sweet potato powder into the flour and at the same time introducing Surgum flour into ordinary flour to get it enriched so that they won’t be eating just ordinary purpose flour”, she said.